The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

by Machado De Assis

  Cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro did not need just a chronicler, but rather a keen observer attuned to a panorama of changing relationships between people and the new foreign influences. Its variegated face demanded an ever-evolving psychological complexity. Before turning to Brás Cubas’ cosmopolitan strategies, however, it is worth considering his shrewdness as a narrator, his peculiar and particular point of view, and his skepticism toward all ideals and certainties, especially those favored in the nineteenth century.

  The Shrewdness of Brás Cubas

  Cats may be less sly and magnolias are certainly less restless than I was in my childhood. (Ch. XI)

  The narrative displays a certain anxiety here and there, a fitful questioning of itself beyond the scope of its modus operand!. The narrator himself realizes that he is implicated. Restricted by formal commitments to tradition, he nevertheless thrusts his own amusing critique of those traditions and literary conventions into the text itself.

  What is there between life and death? A short bridge. Nevertheless, if I hadn’t put this chapter together the reader would have suffered a strong shock, quite harmful to the effect of the book. Jumping from a portrait to an epitaph can be a real and common act. The reader, however, is only taking refuge in the book to escape life. I’m not saying the thought is mine. I’m saying that there’s a grain of truth in it and the form, at least, is picturesque. And, I repeat, it’s not mine. (Ch. CXXIV)

  The reader would be wise not to yield completely to the narrative vagaries—-after all he actively participates in them—and must always keep in mind the narrator’s special circumstances. Brás Cubas, the posthumous narrator, is more audacious about telling the truth than are the living, an advantage he used to reveal not only secrets but follies, treachery, rivalries, and deceptions, all quite jarring in terms of the era’s expectations of the memoir.

  Neither should we expect that the story be told in a linear fashion or be altogether faithful to common experience. Brás Cubas meanders through his narrative collage, a shrewd narrator intent on throwing the reader off the scent, offering explanations in one chapter only to qualify them in the next in a continual process of affirmation and equivocation. This technique tends to go against the grain of verities established in the eighteenth century concerning narrative development. And by constantly throwing the reader off the track with equivocation, humorous digressions, the questioning of fictional convention, and assertions and denials, the narrator weaves a symbolic web that does not hide its allegiance to a particular class perspective.

  Some insight into class helps us understand the significance of citing Stendhal:

  That Stendhal should have confessed to have written one of his books for a hundred readers is something that brings on wonder and concern. Something that will riot cause wonder and probably no concern is whether this other book will have Stendhal’s hundred readers, or fifty, or twenty, or even ten. (To the Reader)

  Here Brás Cubas is referring to the preface of the second edition of De L’Amour in which Stendhal discusses the concept of the “happy few.” The winds of 1789 swept away the old system of arts patronage. What remained was an avid reading and theatre-going public, eager, above all, to be entertained. The book had become a piece of merchandise, something merely to sell and to consume. Now the question was how to seduce the typical reader armed with “common sense” and a bulging pocket book. This hypothetical figure terrorized and obsessed the man of letters represented by Stendhal, and takes on unique dimensions in the musings of Brás Cubas who doesn’t hesitate to prove his superior discernment by using a Stendhalian formulation.

  Points of View

  Brás Cubas writes from the point of view of one doubly exempt from the mundane. For one thing our narrator is a rich, idle Brazilian for whom tedious labor and the bitter flavor of poverty and financial preoccupation are not important considerations. The narrator’s relationship with Quincas Borba is exemplary in this regard. As a classmate (in a double sense), Borba becomes an object of worship among his peers for always affecting a regal air. Later the beggary to which he is reduced makes our narrator sick. But even after Borba robs him (snatching his watch), Borba regains his extraordinary stature when he is restored to his accustomed place by an inheritance. The narrator’s attitude toward Dona Plácida’s birth resembles his stance toward Eugênia’s dignity. Brás Cubas belongs to a social stratum to which individual expression must always be subordinated.

  The narrator’s point of view is also shaped by death. It is within this realm that the author is born, now definitively free from the responsibilities of the living. Death offers him the indolence of eternity. Everything is past, already lived, frozen for the narrator’s use in a kind of crude bas-relief that displays a particular social milieu with its characteristic constraints and obligations.

  The gaze of public opinion, that sharp and judgmental gaze, loses its virtue the moment we tread the territory of death. I’m not saying that it doesn’t reach here and examine and judge us, but we don’t care about the examination or the judgment. My dear living gentlemen and ladies, there’s nothing as incommensurable as the disdain of the deceased. (Ch. XXIV)

  The text, however, does not function as an apologia for the Brazilian upper classes of the nineteenth century. The reader does not end up identifying with the narrator or defending his point of view, thus subverting the era’s understanding of the memoir. There is surely a subtly ironic thwarting of the reader’s expectations as well in the treatment of the social misfits of the book: Brás Cubas, Cotrim, and Quincas Borba.

  The Meaning of Delirium

  In the delirium chapter the lack of a coherent ethical structure sets the stage for a discourse on the futility of all human action, a discourse that perfectly coincides with the vision of the dominant classes in Brazil in the nineteenth century. But it goes further than a narrow discussion of class and proffers a discourse with a metaphysical twist—set forth slyly by the narrator as a delirium which compromises his credibility and leaves the reader wondering how much to believe.

  I must confess now, however, that I felt some sort of prick of curiosity to find out where the origin of the centuries was, if it was as mysterious as the origin of the Nile, and most of all, whether the consummation of those same centuries was really worth anything: the reflections of a sick mind. (Ch. VII)

  This “sick mind” will produce an image whose name is not Jehovah or God, rather Nature or Pandora, a mix of Mother (because it engenders) and Nemesis (because it causes suffering and metes out death). There are no underlying moral principles implied in the action of this being which engenders life; nor are there moral guidelines for those beings thrust out into the vortex of history without the possibility of redemption or final knowledge.

  You great lascivious man, the voluptuosity of nothingness awaits you. (Ch. VII)

  Protected by the knowledge conveyed to him by Nature/Pandora and by death, Brás Cubas realizes that his century, along with the history of humanity with its ideologies, institutions, and images, is an illusion. Such reasoning makes the final words of the book comprehensible: because he is without offspring the narrator at least can state that he wills the legacy of miserable human history to nobody.

  Why narrate, then? The narrative justifies itself as a summing up of personal experience despite the superimposed dimension of class. In each individual, whether rich or poor, the gifts offered by nature resonate: knowledge, life, the will to live, and that scourge of the species—hope—surely one of the foundations of any belief.

  The perspective under discussion is a radical one, deceptive and systematically elusive. But within, narrated material everything is justified: the ideals of loyalty to country, God, ethnicity, progress, and the other givens of the nineteenth-century worldview, along with all the mistaken and contradictory viewpoints that make the following surprising comparison possible:

  Moses, who also wrote about his death, didn’t place it at the opening but at the close: a radical difference bet
ween this book and the Pentateuch. (Ch. I)

  Illuminated by Nature’s aura, divested of its original mythic significance, the figure of Moses is transformed into just another element buffeted about within the vortex of time. The Bible becomes a text like any other, subordinate to the narrator’s whim.

  Through this metamorphosis Brás Cubas becomes St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica itself. Ironically the two discourses, one on the verities of faith and the other on the verities of philosophy, blend, with the Summa representing just one more monument to the written word, a stage in the inexorable journey toward annihilation and the loss of one’s precious identity (name, rank, social milieu). The Summa is an achievement only outdone by Nature, which seeks not to individuate, but to erase distinctions, and to whom the goings on of a Chinese barber and the writings of a church father are equivalent.

  Nevertheless, one has to live to enjoy the brief time which Nature concedes to us. And preferably one should live in Rio de Janeiro in the middle of the nineteenth century looking for ways to satisfy one’s condition as a lazy man of means lacking in neither cultivated social discourse nor the consolation of literature. So let us return to Brás Cubas’ cosmopolitanism.

  Oceanic Culture

  Broadly speaking a dependence on foreign culture nourishes the social imagination of Rio’s reigning elite, to which Brás Cubas is inextricably linked. The mix of European and tropical culture is evident in the conversation of a recent arrival at the capital:

  He liked the theatre very much. As soon as he arrived he went to the São Pedro Theatre where he saw a superb drama, Maria Joana, and a very interesting comedy, Kettly, or the Return to Switzerland. He’d also enjoyed Deperini very much in Sappho or Anna Boleyn, he couldn’t remember which. But Candiani! Yes, sir, she was top-drawer. Now he wanted to hear Ernani, which his daughter sang at home to the piano: Ernani, Ernani, involami … (Ch. XCII)

  To establish his role in the reigning social and literary milieu, Brás Cubas resorts to a series of dialogues with writers emblematic of the Western tradition, writers whose works he has thoroughly enjoyed, including Homer, Dante, Molière, and Klopstock. Sometimes the dialogue is mediated through translated or untranslated direct quotes. In other cases the dialogue takes its cue from the quote in a more obvious intertextual relationship.

  The blatant borrowings result in a poetics of the novel based upon a rendering of text that is at once immediate and complex. For the full resonance of the verbal play to be realized, the reader must actively engage in a dialogue with the “other.” This tactic is essential in establishing the textual parameters within which the meaning of the work is inscribed. The questions of love, power, social relations, and existence are set forth in terms of this narrative symbiosis.

  The initial reference to the complex figure of Hamlet is a case in point. Through the insertion of an untranslated quote from English literature the reader is forced to fathom the text through the mediation of Shakespeare.

  That was how I set out for Hamlet’s undiscovered country without the anxieties or doubts of the young prince, but, rather slow and lumbering, like someone leaving the spectacle late. Late and bored. (Ch. I)

  In the play the character’s anxious relationship to death is related to the implacability of the unknown. There is no return possible for he who voyages to the “undiscovered country.” In the text under discussion, Brás Cubas plays a different hand. He has already passed over the threshold. He is speaking to us from beyond the grave and is flush with the certainties this state bestows upon him. On the other hand he has neither the pathos nor the princely demeanor of Hamlet. Nor is he young. Rather he is an old rue sated by life and at this point rather indifferent to it.

  The differences notwithstanding, it’s important to note how the theatrical mode seeps into the text. For instance, through the word spectacle, signifying both representation and theatrical show. Then the narrator abandons himself to a delirium in which all of humanity’s trials and tribulations are reduced to an amusing if rather monotonous and repetitive entertainment.

  The term spectacle is apt not only because the theatre is one of the obsessions of our deceased author, but because he is acutely attuned to the levels of dissimulation necessary to thrive in the bourgeois and aristocratic salons of Imperial Brazil.

  My brain was a stage on which plays of all kinds were presented: sacred dramas, austere, scrupulous, elegant comedies, wild farces, short skits, buffoonery, pandemonium, sensitive soul. (Ch. XXXIV)

  Thus the novel allows for constant theatrical references: Estela Sezefreda, Candiani, Prometheus Unbound, Norma, Othello, El Cid. Tartuffe and Figaro also make appearances, characters who skillfully use subterfuge to gain financial advantage.

  The Influence of France

  Let us turn now to the influence exerted by the French. Not only the primacy of its literature, but the vitality of its political and cultural life left an indelible imprint on Brazilian culture. France’s artistic renown and intellectual preeminence were firmly established by the seventeenth century. With the death of Louis XIV, Paris—a burgeoning metropolis with cafes, theatres, and salons where literary reputations could be made or broken—usurped the role the court had once played as cultural arbiter and exerted enormous influence over all European elites. For a picture of France’s artistic scope one need only consider the century’s literary giants—Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Molière, Bossuet, and La Fontaine (and, later, the Académie Française). The French Revolution fanned the flames of this influence even as it caused a shift in political allegiances. And the ideas forged and tempered in France found a responsive echo in the clamor of liberty spreading throughout the Americas.

  Already in the eighteenth century Brazil was turning away from Portugal, the European country to which it had the clearest ties. Eschewing that cultural and political environment with its waning vitality, Brazil sought its models in a more progressive Europe, assimilating its ideas, debates, and issues. This cross-pollination occurred via Brazilian students educated abroad and through the mediation of Portuguese elites themselves sent to Brazil as colonial administrators or who accompanied the royal family when it hurriedly moved to Brazil in 1808. In addition, a significant number of French nationals took up residence in Brazil after the fall of Napoleon. As booksellers and entrepreneurs they became the intermediaries between the two cultures.

  The principal players were Victor Hugo, Musset, Lamartine, the Dumas brothers, Zola, and the philosophers Victor Cousin and Auguste Comte. Paris remained an object of fascination for the Brazilian upper crust. At that time the royal family had many ties with France: Princess Isabel, heir to the throne, was married to the Count D’Eu. The emperor Pedro II exchanged letters with French intellectuals including Gobineau, the exambassador to Brazil, and Victor Hugo himself whom the emperor visited in Paris. Furthermore, since Brazil had never had a colonial relationship with France, there was no vestigial rancor to contend with or unresolved sovereignty issues. A gauge of France’s influence on South American cultural and political life in the mid-1800s is expressed by the poet Junqueira Freire:

  After the glorious epoch of our political emancipation, many geniuses emerged, but even today we can not claim complete literary emancipation. Until such a time, we are forced to follow some guiding principle and let that principle be France. For she is the lighthouse which illuminates the entire civilized world. (Elementos de rhetorics national)

  As we have seen, the narrator’s domain has been shaped by French elements. In the same way that Brás Cubas has preserved for posterity realities which are typically local—the sweets of the Mothers of Charity, the festivals of independence—he characterizes for us, both as witness and active agent, the elements of Brazil’s cultural miscegenation. Let’s examine some of the traces this France left in Brazil, without losing sight of the fact that the new fictional parameters demanded that foreign influences be incorporated in original ways.

  Love and Illusion

  A French quote wil
l offer a window onto the amorous world of Brás Cubas, a world in which tragic emotions have no place. The recurrent underplaying of the theme of love confirms only the cold, static realization that it is impossible to give oneself fully to feeling.

  In Chapter VI a vision of Virgília, Brás Cubas’ great love, appears to him when he is at death’s door. The title of the chapter, a French quote from Corneille’s Le Cid (Chimène, qui l’eût dit? Rodrigue, qui l’eût cru?) is inverted to read “Rodrigue, qui l’eût cru? Chimène, qui l’eût dit?”

  The significance of the inversion is not readily apparent. After all we’re at the beginning of the book and not yet privy to the full details of this passion. What we know is that there is a woman at the funeral who appears to be mourning more intensely than Brás Cubas’ own relatives. In the French play Chimène’s father strikes Rodrigue’s old father, who, unable to parry the attack from the younger man, asks his son for revenge. The son does his father’s bidding despite his love for Chimène, obligating her in turn to revenge her own father’s death despite her enduring passion for the young man. The quoted verses constitute one of the high points of the play: it is at this juncture with the alexandrine that love and fate are synthesized.